A Few Bicycles More, page 7
“As long as you don’t choose a howler monkey. Anyway, that question broke the ice to find out what they like to do for fun. And that led to me finding out that Mom doesn’t want me cycling on the roads. She says the roads here are dangerous.”
We can return to the bike trail we took to get here. That is not a road. It continues for another 130 miles to Maryland.
“That’s true,” Bicycle said. “Although we have to ride on the road to get to that trail.”
Perhaps I can use satellite imagery to find a way to travel off-road. Also, riding on the sidewalk is not prohibited in West Virginia. I will check for sidewalk options.
Bicycle was glad the Fortune was willing to get creative. She’d have to think of a way to bring these ideas up to Mom and Dad.
She could hear raised voices inside the apartment: “What do you mean, you don’t know where she is?”
“We’re sure she’s fine, Mom, nothing’s wrong.”
The door flew open and Dad appeared. He sucked in his breath. “Thank goodness, here you are!” Then he called over his shoulder, “Found her!” He turned back to Bicycle and grimaced. “It’d be best if you tell me or your mother when you leave the apartment.”
“Sure, no problem,” said Bicycle. However, it did turn out to be a problem. For the next several days, Bicycle kept bringing her parents to the edge of panic.
She didn’t mean to, of course. She’d feel the urge to have a little alone time and instinctually obey it. She didn’t think it would matter if she wandered down a different hallway to seek out some silence when walking back from lunch—until her family came sprinting toward her. She couldn’t get used to telling someone when she went to use the bathroom, only remembering she hadn’t when Mom banged the restroom door open, shouting her name. Her old life at the monastery had not trained her for this. Other than showing up for homeschooling and helping with chores, the rest of her time had been her own.
Bicycle came right out at one point and told her mom, “Sister Wanda let me ride my bike pretty much anywhere as long as I was home in time for dinner. I’m more used to that kind of freedom.”
Mom shook her head and looked to the heavens. She murmured, “Sister Wanda must have nerves of steel.” She told Bicycle, “This family runs on togetherness. That’s best for us. I already lost you once and I can’t . . . I can’t . . .” Mom trailed off and bit her bottom lip, eyes filled with pain. “I just can’t.”
Bicycle knew she was seeing the Band-Aid-peeling face Cookie had mentioned. It hurt to look at; Bicycle scrambled for something to say to make it stop. She borrowed some words Apple had used to reassure their mother a few days before: “It’s okay, Mom. I understand.” She thought, I understand that we can’t talk about this. I’d better talk to Sister Wanda instead.
However, Bicycle’s short, stilted conversations with Sister Wanda didn’t give her the guidance she needed. The nun kept reiterating that Bicycle needed to keep listening to and learning about her family. Bicycle felt like she’d heard at least one thing loud and clear: they needed her to stay close.
She also thought she might be developing a rudimentary version of the mind-reading Quint Sense, but it wasn’t a good feeling. Bicycle could tell that her sisters had to scramble to calm Mom and Dad after her inadvertent disappearances. The girls never complained, but rather behaved like they had to clean up a mess Bicycle kept making. It felt like there had been a balance between the six family members before she’d shown up, like a cart with three wheels on each side. She was the odd seventh wheel, throwing it out of whack.
When apartment-cleaning time came around, she looked for a way to show she was a team player. She said, “I’ll do whatever everyone’s least favorite chore is.”
Daff handed her the dusting cloth with a fervent thank-you. Bicycle wiped down the shelves and tables and moved on to clean the Fortune’s computer screen.
Did you ask your mom when we can go for a ride? the Fortune blinked.
“It’s been raining every day,” Bicycle whispered, knowing this was a feeble excuse.
Rain never stopped us before.
“We’ll go soon,” she said, turning away, not ready to talk about it. She shouldn’t be dusting her bike—bikes shouldn’t hold still long enough to collect dust. But how could she keep bringing up the idea of riding her bike somewhere alone? That was the opposite of staying close the way everyone wanted her to. Following her urge toward adventure would be selfish. She gave herself a pep talk. I figured out how to make friends this summer, which wasn’t easy. I can figure out a way to fit in with my family.
She dusted the piano, creating a peculiar tune that sounded like a cat prancing up the keyboard. She dusted a framed picture of Mom and Dad each holding a pair of hiking boots in the air. “What’s this photo of?” she asked Apple, who was sweeping rubbish into a dustpan held by Banana.
Apple glanced at it. “Oh, that’s from when Mom and Dad met on a walk in the woods.”
Dad must have overheard, because he came toward them from the sink with a dripping sponge. “That wasn’t just any walk in the woods. I was hiking the two-thousand-mile-long Appalachian Trail, and I was ready to throw in the towel after only a couple of days. Then I met this woman, telling these wild stories around the campfire about how she’d lost all her food in a mudslide, covered her feet in duct tape to stop her blisters from growing more blisters, then outwitted a bear who tried to eat her glasses. And she was grinning when she told them. She said she couldn’t wait to see what adventures lay around the next bend in the trail.”
Banana shook her head. “What happened to you? You are so not those people anymore.” Apple thumped Banana’s ankle with the broom.
Dad said, “When you have children, your priorities change. Instead of jumping headfirst into each day, you have to think things through on how you’ll keep everyone fed, sheltered, and safe.”
“Alex! You are dripping sponge water everywhere,” Mom said from the kitchenette area. “Get back over here.”
“Coming, dear,” Dad replied, then told the girls, “Your mother is still an unstoppable force, don’t you forget it.”
Bicycle moved on from the hiking photo to dust the framed family portrait of Mom and Dad with their five identical babies arranged on their laps. Mom and Dad were laughing. They looked whole and content, like there was a place for each of them and each of them was in their place. She polished the faces and tried to guess which was hers.
She decided the first Rule for Family Belonging was Find a Place to Fit In. And the second, nearly-as-important one was Ask Before You Use the Bathroom.
A big box arrived in the mail from Sister Wanda on Saturday. Surrounded by her curious sisters, Bicycle cut the packing tape and unfolded the top flaps to find her clothes, her postcard collection, her books, her cycling magazines, and her favorite pillow tucked together with military-neat precision. It looked like Sister Wanda had ironed everything that could be ironed, including Bicycle’s socks.
Bicycle pulled out her bike repair manual, revealing that Brother Otto had included a container of his famous zucchini muffins, plus what looked like a long, chatty note about the goings-on at the monastery. She saw that the Top Monk had cut out a newspaper article for her about electric bikes and written the word Sandwich in the margin, underlined twice. The whole thing made Bicycle feel homesick and comforted at the same time.
Cookie sniffed and peered into the box. “What kind of muffins are those? I can smell nutmeg from here.”
“Does that shirt have a bike embroidered on it?” asked Daff.
“You have a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth!” Banana said, reaching into the box.
Apple pushed Banana’s hand out of the box and said to Bicycle, “Do you want help unpacking, or would you rather go through your things on your own?”
Bicycle hugged her repair manual to her chest and thought to herself, Fit in. Be sisterly. Share. She said, “You can help if you want.”
As her sisters pulled out her belongings, asking questions and offering commentary, Bicycle did her best to ignore the part of her that wanted to climb inside the box and close the lid for some peace and quiet.
SLOW DOWN!
The Monday before Halloween, a school bell’s BRIIIIIIING! reverberated with the first light of dawn. Bicycle sat up and banged her head on the bottom of Daff’s bunk.
“Noooo, not the school bell again,” Daff moaned. “Why can’t they get that fixed?” The family had mentioned that the building’s bell system was supposed to have been disconnected when the commune moved in, but for some reason it occasionally still went off.
Bicycle knew that ring. It was coming not from the school system, but from the Fortune. “No, it’s my bike. I’ll take care of it.” For the first time in a week, the light coming through the windows wasn’t dimmed by a sheet of rain. This helped her avoid tripping over her mother, curled up on the braided rug again. Mom was somehow sleeping through the racket.
Bicycle made it over to the raucously ringing Fortune and pressed a bunch of buttons even though she didn’t think it’d help. “Shush, please shush, I’m here. What’s wrong?”
The magnet pull is back, though it’s fainter than before.
“I don’t understand.” A shaft of sunlight chose that moment to shine through the room’s big windows, making Bicycle squint and shield her eyes “We didn’t find anything at the recycling place.”
The Fortune’s school-bell alarm switched to “Folsom Prison Blues.” Johnny Cash sang about hearing the train a-comin’, rollin’ round the bend, but how he hadn’t seen the sunshine since he didn’t know when. The music got quieter and quieter through the chorus until the bike went silent. The pull is gone, the Fortune blinked.
“What do you think that meant?” Bicycle asked, taking her hands from her eyes as a cloud swaddled the sunlight. “Are there more bikes that need rescuing somewhere?”
Insufficient data.
“What’s up?” four voices chorused behind Bicycle.
She turned. Her sisters had followed her out of bed.
Cookie, fiddling with one of the extra pockets she’d stitched to her pajama top, said, “Is your bike feeling okay?”
“I think so. But it might be getting a message that some other bikes are not. Can we ask Mom and Dad to take us to the scrapyard in West Harpers Ferry right now?” The scrapyard owner had told Sister Wanda there weren’t any bikes left to buy, but he might have made a mistake. It seemed like a logical place to check.
Banana shook her head. “Don’t you remember how Mom acts when she wakes up too early? Dad’s about the same.”
I do not know for sure if this was an attempt at communication or some sort of anomaly, the Fortune blinked.
“The Fortune and I can just go before Mom and Dad wake up,” Bicycle said. “I remember the way.”
“Whoa,” said Apple. “First, Mom and Dad would explode from worry if you left here without them.”
“Second, after they exploded, Mom would never forgive us if we let you leave here without them,” said Banana.
“Maybe we can help you with whatever’s going on,” said Cookie.
“Can you tell us what is going on? Why do you need to go to a scrapyard?” said Daff.
Bicycle explained as much as she thought she understood about her bike being pulled to the scrapyard by messages from bikes in danger of being destroyed.
Banana squinted and said, “I’ve never owned a bike, but I didn’t think they could communicate with each other.”
Bicycle said, “The Fortune is unique. It was invented by someone who was trying to create the perfect traveling machine. Sometimes I think there’s nothing it can’t do, except tell funny knock-knock jokes.”
Apple said, “So you haven’t gotten a message for over a week, and then it happened again. Why do you think it’s coming from the same place? Was it the same music you heard before?”
Bicycle scratched her head. “It was the last song we heard. This time it was shorter, though, and it faded away. Can you play it again, Fortune?”
The bike did so.
Daff asked, “Maybe this message came from Folsom Prison—is that around here?”
It is in northern California.
Bicycle tilted the computer screen so her sisters could see it.
“That’s heaps of miles away,” said Cookie.
It is 2,814.1257 miles away. We could be there in 235 hours. Everywhere within the continents of North and South America is within biking distance if we have enough time.
“I don’t think we should go to California right off the bat,” Bicycle said, but something inside her felt a tug. She’d felt pretty adventured-out before coming to Harpers Ferry, but things were different now that even the suggestion of adventure seemed forbidden. Spending 235 hours in the saddle sounded more appealing than spending zero.
Dad parted the curtain and came out yawning. “Good morning, girls.” He looked around. “Where is your mother?”
“Our floor,” Daff told him.
Their father nodded and shuffled over to start up the coffee maker. “This’ll wake her up.”
Bicycle decided it couldn’t hurt to ask for his help. “Dad, can we go to the scrapyard in West Harpers Ferry today?”
“What for?” He yawned again.
“I . . . heard they have some bikes for sale.”
“But you have a bike, and your sisters don’t ride.” The coffee maker had most of his attention.
Bicycle thought fast. “That’s why we need them, so I can teach my sisters to ride. It’s good exercise. And a girl needs a bicycle like a fish needs water.” Sister Wanda had said that to her once.
Dad grunted in amusement. “The commune property room most likely has a couple for you to share.”
Bicycle said, “I think the ones at the scrapyard are really high-quality, though. Could we at least go look?”
Dad watched the stream of coffee dripping down into his mug. “High-quality means out of our price range. Plus, it isn’t our turn to use the commune’s car. Tell you what: I’ll check the property room today and see how many bikes I can dig up.” He went back to staring at his dripping coffee.
Bicycle tried but couldn’t think of a convincing argument against this. “Okay,” she said reluctantly. She crossed her fingers and toes that whoever or whatever had communicated with the Fortune this morning could hang in there until she knew what to do and how to do it.
She tried to look on the bright side: If there were bikes in the community property room, she could teach her sisters how to ride this afternoon. This could be her chance to follow the first Rule of Family Belonging and fit in with her family as the cycling expert.
When Dad came back from the property room that afternoon with four helmets but only one bike, Bicycle’s cycling expertise didn’t seem like it was going to matter.
Mom looked up from graphing her latest crossword puzzle for the New York Times. “What are you doing with that?”
Bicycle was thinking the same thing. The bike Dad wheeled in was the wrong size, probably meant for your average eight-year-old. It had a bell and a cute wicker handlebar basket adorned with bright plastic flowers.
Dad said, “There’s so much stuff in that property room, it’s the only one I could find. I thought maybe this would be okay for learning on.”
“Learning what?” Mom asked.
“How to ride,” said Apple, but without enthusiasm.
Bicycle did a double-take: How could anyone look at bike riding without enthusiasm? She then realized Banana and Daff also had resigned expressions on their faces.
Only Cookie’s eyes were on the bike. “Is that a bell?” She took the handlebars from Dad. “Can I try it?” She threw her leg over the seat and sat down, her knees bent and feet flat on the floor. She ding-a-linged the tiny silver bell. “It’s perfect.”
Bicycle held her tongue. It was far from perfect, but she understood Cookie’s smile. Getting on a bike was a magical feeling.
“What on earth made you decide to bring this in here today?” said Mom.
“The girls were talking about bikes this morning, and I told them I’d see what I could find,” Dad said. “I didn’t realize until Yoof—sorry, Bicycle—came home that we’d never gotten around to teaching the girls to ride. I learned when I was seven, and it was such a great feeling when I raced my friends around the block.”
Mom made an exasperated noise. “There’s no block for the girls to race around, Alex. I bet you fell down more than once when you were learning. What about scrapes and bruises and, heaven forbid, the possibility of broken bones? And I know the neighborhood where you grew up didn’t have the traffic we have today, or distracted drivers on cell phones.”
“Guess I didn’t think it through,” Dad said. “We could use the soccer field—”
Mom interrupted him. “With that high grass, perfect for hiding ticks and snakes? What if someone hits a gopher hole and falls down and gets bitten by an angry gopher swarm? No, I’m not comfortable with it. Please take it back.”
Cookie’s face fell. “Oh. Are you sure?”
“You know I’m only saying this for your own good. Nothing matters more than my girls’ safety,” Mom told her. “Going for walks is just as good as biking, and we don’t have to leave the commune to do it.”
We don’t have to leave the commune to do it—Mom’s words gave Bicycle an idea. “There is a block for us to ride around,” Bicycle said to her mother.
Everyone turned to look at her.
“I can teach them in the hallway. We can follow the loop from the cafeteria. We won’t race, we’ll go slowly, and do it in the afternoon when the hallways are less crowded.” She tried to address the other concerns Mom had raised. “There won’t be any ticks, snakes, or gopher holes. We’ll wear helmets, and we can even put on other protective gear like shin guards or elbow pads if you have them.” She looked at the little bike and then at the Fortune. “I can teach them on my bike instead of this mini one.”
“Oh, let’s give the little bike a chance!” Cookie said, ding-a-linging the bell again. “You can just tell it wants a chance. Plus, we’re closer to the ground on this one, so we won’t fall far if we do fall. Not that we’ll fall.”
